Top growth hacking tactic #3 for landing pages (copywriting): If you are asking for a lot, write a lot. If you are asking for little, write little. (Source: unbounce.com)

Do you have technically savvy power users in your marketing team? – Marketers that understand how to leverage technology to make a difference to the bottom line? (Source: marketingland.com)

Let people use the product and then simply ask them what it does: “What you hear can point to cognitive hurdles” – a chance to simplify. Protip: “When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation” – CEO, Bump. (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Bryan Eisenberg might be onto something here: “The number one reason senior marketers don’t buy into the data and technology is because they’re worried that the results will prove their intuition wrong. And, that more often than not, those intuitions are wrong”. (Source: blogs.hbr.org)

App developers, New Relic for Mobile Apps looks interesting – Realtime visualisation of how the app is performing across services, carriers and different OS’s. Essentially a live, “global app health check report” across all users. (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Brilliant set of tools for e-com website optimisation: Usability, conversion and performance testing. Even good old Xenu link sleuth makes an appearance! (Source: practicalecommerce.com)

Spot on: “Marketing as a science is really about running good controlled experiments to test hypotheses. This is the heart of the scientific method applied to any discipline.” (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Ah yes good old advice from Jakob Nielsen himself on UX testing from the year 2000: “The curve clearly shows that you need to test with at least 15 users to discover all the usability problems in the design” – luckily we now have the ability to conduct real-time conversion/UX tests and measure the effect on revenue across thousands of people to discover “all the usability problems”. Costs have come down dramatically and ultimately the global consumer wins as a result of better experience and product design. (Source: nngroup.com)

Remember, to get conversions you need clicks first. And clicks don’t “just happen” – your prospects/customers are clicking on content because they want something. Brilliant quote from the article: “It’s only once we begin to understand what gets people to click that we can really understand what gets people to convert.” (Source: unbounce.com)

Introducing a CRO testing culture mitigates risk, something marketing doesn’t talk a lot about. And it also starts the process of implementing a structured approach for site changes, which means your organisation is “twice as likely to see a large increase in sales than other orgs [not focused on CRO]” (eConsultancy). (Source: blog.crazyegg.com)

Interesting to learn that matching the linguistic style of your website audience increases conversion rate, and this also makes the audience more resilient to calling out excessively positive reviews as “fake”. (Source: unbounce.com)

Digital analysts, don’t be afraid to push back on data requests, especially those that start with “it would be interesting to see…” – ask the “so what” questions early to avoid producing costly reports that have no inherent, actionable value! (Source: tim.webanalyticsdemystified.com)

Does your organisation’s content exist to entertain, educate, inspire or convince? Take a look at KissMetrics’ Content Matrix to help you think strategically about content (halfway down the page). (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

Make sure you evaluate your approach to data from time to time. – Have you fallen into this trap? You develop a belief > You go find data that correlates with that belief > You then use that data to cement/substantiate your belief. (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Good intro to digital marketing metrics. For retail, the new customer acquisition metric (volume and cost) is one of the most significant KPIs to look at. (Source: marketingland.com)

Finally some proof that there’s others out there suffering from real-time data addiction! (Source: web-savvy-marketing.com)

A simple but powerful example of the importance of developing a testing and optimisation culture within your marketing teams. The goal: To improve each stage of the purchase funnel. (Source: exacttarget.com)

Brilliant collection of CRO case studies, no less than 100, we like this one: “#28 Eliminating One Field Increases Expedia’s Profit by $12 million”. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

A nice and easy way to generate content, tied to measured business outcomes: “Everyone is encouraged to add ideas to the content plan and from here we then begin to scorecard the content based on whether it will assist our reach, revenue or brand reputation.” (Source: econsultancy.com)

Gotta love Avinash: “Rather than ‘simplify’ things and put five metrics into a blender and puke out an ‘easy to understand’ number, my strategy would be to expose the focusing factors (contributing metrics) in order to encourage our leadership to look a little deeper to understand performance”. (Source: kaushik.net)

Applying Gossen’s law of diminishing marginal utility to web analytics and CRO: Lead your organisation’s analytics and conversion optimisation efforts assertively, but know when to shift focus. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)

Small Data (simple analytics) is completely under-hyped. In comparison to Big Data, it provides faster decision-making speed, easier access to data and is much cheaper in both system and resource cost. Time to roll up your sleeves marketers, product managers and CMO’s – login to Google Analytics! (Source: forbes.com)

Business Analytics focused on profitability: Taking a macro approach with web analytics definitely helps to provide a different, more complete view of clicks and visitors that drive the biggest bottom-line business benefit. Great post! (Source: kaushik.net)

Looking forward to the final report from Aberdeen, and agree with David’s early assessment: “Self-service BI enables more widespread use of analytics at least partly because it means scarce IT skills aren’t frittered away…Consequently, IT has more time to get BI into the hands of more users.” (Source: blogs.aberdeen.com)

How to optimise YouTube One Channel using Analytics: Keep track of viewership, traffic source and especially watch-time. This one is important as YouTube is now optimising its search and discovery algorithm against it. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

PLA Optimisation Tip #2: Suppress poor performing products (remove them from their current category and move them to a low bid Ad Group). (Source: searchengineland.com)

Nice three part series on CRO covering implementation of GA Experiments as well as a number of other popular testing tools. Solid data is one of the best ways of creating organisational change for digital. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)

Facebook appears to be winning the war for app install ad dollars: Best performer in Q1, evaluation based on clicks/installs (conversion rate), user quality and new app user volume. (Source: appsflyer.com)

What could you possibly learn from multi-channel funnel data from over 36,000 GA clients with millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries? A whole lot. Very few companies have this sort of data to share – read this post, there are significant leanings here. (Source: adwords.blogspot.co.nz)

Focusing your organisation to be more “data driven”..? – Assuming you have the technology and the people, here is a nice run down of the areas to tackle as far as business process is concerned. (Source: practicalecommerce.com)

Step-by-step instructions to track GA e-com transactions with Universal Analytics. Why does this matter? Better information about how customers interact with your business across many devices and touch-points, including mobile apps. Offline data can also be brought in. (Source: cutroni.com)

How would a laser-sharp focus on a single metric change your bottom line..? Apply Lean Analytics: “Measure everything, but focus on one thing at a time”, also called One Metric That Matters (OMTM). (Source: practicetrumpstheory.com)

If you only implement half of these you’ll be significantly better off knowing what really works, and what doesn’t. Don’t delay acting on your discoveries. (Source: econsultancy.com)

Apart from the obvious, there are other reasons why key metrics are important: They shape organisations, so chose well: “Players play to the metrics their management values, even at the cost of the team.” (Source: blogs.hbr.org)

Solid app behavioural/usage analytics will prove to be a key feature to continue to attract developers to build apps for Android. Especially important for Google to do this given in the short term developers are still making more $ from iOS apps (or are they?). (Source: google.com)

Quick summary of the 5 mobile tracking techniques: How they work, privacy and user control (UDID, MAC, OpenUDID, ODIN and cookies). (Source: businessinsider.com.au)

Link Webmaster Tools to AdWords and use the paid / organic combined impression share report to figure out what % of all Google search impressions you are neither reaching with a paid ad, nor via an organic listing for a given keyword. (Source: lunametrics.com)

Lesson #2 learnt from thousands of usability studies: Site categorisation needs to make sense. It shouldn’t take close to a minute to find the category for a small vacuum cleaner (watch the videos). (Source: moz.com)

Did you know that there is a direct correlation between page load speed and revenue? Amazon found that revenue increased by 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement. (Source: getpocket.com)

A good reminder that correlation is not the same as causation. (Source: gigaom.com)

Pretty graphic but is colour really “up to 85% the reason people decide to buy” – yes, product colour maybe, but not the logo or website “colours”. Testing multiple page variations is always best. (Source: socialmediatoday.com)

Nice tutorial on applying Chi-Square to an A/B conversion optimisation project. Good excuse to dig out your Statistics 208 textbook from university decades ago…and a reminder that Stats and Marketing go great together. (Source: blog.hubspot.com)

Apart from the obvious issue of users being split across iOS and Android, we’d say the mobile marketplace challenge is mostly related to user density for a specific location. (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Mobile tactics that include video are deemed most effective at engaging users – that’s why Facebook’s launch of their new mobile CPA app install ad type, with an intro video, makes a lot of sense. (Source: marketingsherpa.com)

Research firm Ovum estimates a staggering $US23 Billion of SMS revenue was lost in 2012 due to the popularity of smartphone chat apps like WhatsApp. (Source: bbc.co.uk)

We’re predicting that this will become a key global ad buy for all app developers: Facebook’s mobile-device targeted app install ads are now offered on a CPA basis, with an app video preview option! (Source: searchenginejournal.com)

The long term war for winning the hearts of app developers has just accelerated, at least at the “please just take care of the backend stuff” level. Google Tag Manager is from the same strategic play book (one tag to rule all tags). (Source: venturebeat.com)

Mobile Operating Systems share in New Zealand: iOS is the winner with 67% (FIRST). (Source: firstdigital.co.nz)

A third of in-store shoppers find information on their smartphone as opposed to contacting employees (Google – Mobile In Store). (Source: vocus.com)

Copywriting for responsive design: “If you can define content types based on what they include at a semantic level, you can create sound rules to guide how they bend and reshape: You can let your content go, without fearing where it will end up.” (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

Forrester: “Mobile is the most important strategic change in retail banking in over a decade.” (Source: blogs.forrester.com)

And the good news is that ad revenue is not the primary profit driver! (Source: iab.org.nz)

Amazon continues to set the benchmark in whatever they do, this time #1 for mobile e-com (n=6,200). (Source: mediapost.com)

Nov FB mobile app update resulted in a 60% increase in the 2G/3G overall signaling load and a 25% increase in the airtime consumed. At some stage these sort of app updates will start to hurt the battery. (Source: alcatel-lucent.com)

eMarketer: “By 2014, one in four mobile phone users will redeem a coupon via a mobile device” (Source: emarketer.com)

App Store Optimization (ASO) feels like the early days of SEO: “Having a keyword in your title can improve your app’s search ranking for that keyword by an average of 10.3%” (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

Right, so now we have hard data to suggest that the average iOS app is “on average 8% better” than the average Android app. Short term? Interesting. Long term? Google Play will dominate the market, app quality will follow and so will app developer revenues. (Source: readwrite.com)

Microsoft isn’t very happy with Google right now… “It seems to us that Google’s reasons for blocking our app are manufactured so that we can’t give our users the same experience Android and iPhone users are getting. The roadblocks Google has set up are impossible to overcome, and they know it.” (Source: blogs.technet.com)

Wow, scary to hear how badly April has turned out for freemium (ad supported) app developers on the MS platform. Seems the monitisation options for Windows Store Apps are either “Paid App” or “Stop”. Let’s hope MS can turn this around. (Source: itworld.com)

Paid and Organic Search

An average of 12.8% of mobile searches result in a conversion, 5.3% call a business. Sounds like there is still a lot of scope to increase usage of the AdWords click-to-call ad template. (Source: adwords.blogspot.co.nz)

As a retailer, should you be running AdWords even if your website is not mobile optimised..? – Consider this sobering stat: “82% of (in-store) smartphone shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions” (Source: googlemobileads.blogspot.co.uk)

We’d say this is bigger news than people realise. Google CPC Email will extend person-specific search re-targeting on a massive scale. (Source: news.cnet.com)

EA Battlefield (3?) gaming case study: “After cutting television’s share from 80% to half and boosting spending on video and paid search, sales of the new version jumped by 23%.” (Source: economist.com)

The AdWords auction insights report now runs across groups of Keywords, Ad Groups or Campaigns, revealing “how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours, or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you.” (Source: adwords.blogspot.co.nz)

AdWords Remarketing Best Practice #5: Create Custom Combinations. For example, incentivise a return visit for those consumers who added a product to their basket, but did not complete the checkout process. (Source: verticalleap.co.uk)

AdWords dynamic remarketing is an absolute must for e-com sites: Retarget prospects who have viewed a specific product, with a display ad for that exact same product, across the entire product catalogue – dynamically (display ad builder). (Source: wordstream.com)

2012 avg. CTR for smartphones 107 percent higher than desktops… – This will be quite different for 2013 given the recent mobile-on-by-default change for AdWords. (Source: m.clickz.com)

The new AdWords mobile bid multiplier can be turned up X percent of your desktop bid for high-value keywords in the right location at the right time (mobile). (Source: venturebeat.com)

The study doesn’t really address SEM performance, but interesting to see the clear links to weather. A bit more background on the data sources would have been useful. (Source: searchengineland.com)

E-com post-transaction retargeting of existing customers is now possible for Google search ads also, no longer just GDN. (Source: adwords.blogspot.co.nz)

Marin Q4 report puts Australia at the top for highest percentage of clicks from mobile devices: 26% from smartphones and tablets (combined). (Source: marketingmag.com.au)

The new AdWords Keyword Planner appears to make setup even easier, but don’t forget about AdWords Editor – useful for fast copy-paste account structuring. (Source: searchengineland.com)

With respect to organic search keyword [not provided] we’d have to agree with this statement: “If it really meant the explanation given about privacy, they [Google] not only wouldn’t be giving up paid keyword data, but also could have found a sensible middle ground of what to share instead of removing it all.” (Source: econsultancy.com)

Organic position #1 drives 33% of total clicks of top 15. Sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 92% of all traffic from an average search (Chitika, US/CA data). (Source: chitika.com)

Read this slowly: “According to a survey of over 72 Million customers shopping on 86 retail sites, Email is the number 3 source of customer acquisition.” (Custora, June 13). (Source: marketingland.com)

The FTC has sent another batch of letters to search engines re-emphasising the continued need for “visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers”. We’d say that’s a good thing. (Source: getpocket.com)

Customer acquisition via email has quadrupled over the last 4 years: An increasing number of e-com retailers are using lead gen tactics to acquire email addresses, and then converting these into paying customers (Custora). (Source: blog.custora.com)

Non-paid search continues to be the primary way people find websites (Forrester, US/CA, n=30,000+). (Source: marketingcharts.com)

Good outline of how to maximise exposure for YouTube videos. In addition, consider Promoted Videos via AdWords. TrueView will ensure only actual views are payable; optimise for max views at min CPV. (Source: clickz.com)

Ignoring Google+ is not an option: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification” – Schmidt. (Source: searchenginejournal.com)

You might have heard of Caffeine, Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. But do you remember Jagger, Big Daddy and Vince? (Source: blog.hubspot.com)

Tip #5 for scaling content marketing: Focus on discovery by establishing your brand as an authority on community sites. (Source: kaiserthesage.com)

For this to yield any meaningful results you will need to be seriously disciplined and also work with a large enough team to execute control tactics vs test group simultaneously. Not for the faint-hearted… (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

Performance Advertising

Nice little case study where GDN and GDN remarketing was used to drive up total traffic and conversion volumes for a search campaign that required tight geographic targeting. (Source: ppchero.com)

What if you took the first ever banner ad from 1994 (AT&T running on Wired) and ran that same ad on the Google Display Network today, how would it perform? – What a geeky idea, we love it! And interesting results, too. (Source: p.barker.dj)

Retargeting by cookieID or email is coming to Twitter. (Source: venturebeat.com)

One reason why DSP’s really don’t add that much value (or why its best to focus on performance and results). (Source: adweek.com)

Dynamic remarketing is dynamite for e-com stores, and is only available in Adwords if your shopping feed is sorted, via Merchant Center. Here’s a good primer. (Source: practicalecommerce.com)

The time has come for Facebook user harvesting/monetisation: Retargeted FBX ads now available in the newsfeed… (Source: venturebeat.com)

Nice way to optimise yield automatically though we suspect if publisher uptake of this feature isn’t as high as expected, Google will lock this down as a more automatic feature “Click here to activate yield optimiser and start running auto-experiments”. After all, eCPM is what makes the world go around, especially for Google! (Source: adsense.blogspot.co.nz)

Given we’re now all staring at eye-facing phone cameras, it’s unavoidable really that we’ll soon be measuring how many people *actually saw* our ads. But some sort of response measure is probably a better way to quantify effectiveness. Blinking? (Source: searchenginejournal.com)

Amazon is much less competitive in markets where they don’t have a local presence. But consumers still use it as reference point for pricing and reviews. Now, imagine being able to retarget users against their Amazon view/browse/add-to-basket/buy profile! (Source: www.linkedin.com)

Much like TrueView for YouTube, Active View will benefit both publishers and advertisers in the long term. Ads that are actually “seen” (50% for 1 sec+, IAB) are obviously more useful than those that are not. (Source: clickz.com)

Rewarding an advertiser’s product relevancy for searches with commercial intent has got to be a good thing. (Source: practicalecommerce.com)

Obviously you would use both but when it comes to volume, Google wins. The difference in CR will be one to watch, bearing in mind Amazon has access to transaction history for logged-in users. (Source: smartinsights.com)

Social Media Marketing

Sales people using social media are achieving and exceeding targets at a greater rate than those who are not, and yet “50.1% of sales people who report using social media state that they spend less than 10% of their selling time on social media.” (Source: forbes.com)

Interesting stat from a CEB survey: B2B brands that connect with their buyers on an emotional level will realise 200% greater “impact” compared to brands that are primarily empathising business or functional value (n=3,000). (Source: b2bmarketinginsider.com)

The LinkedIn Volunteering Marketplace: An absolutely brilliant idea, thank you LinkedIn for getting this established, what a great use of the platform for the common good of society. (Source: blog.linkedin.com)

From comparing Facebook and Twitter revenue, monthly active users (MAUs) and avg rev/user it seems Twitter is lagging behind on the monetisation front (company lifetime adjusted). But the 75% of ad rev from mobile suggests at least that bit is working – cf 53% for Facebook per Q4 earnings report. But then again FB has nearly a Bil mobile MAUs. (Source: qz.com)

Seems entirely logical: “Extraverts much more likely to share on Facebook”. (Source: marketingtechblog.com)

Facebook’s “Like” button is pressed on average 254,629 times per second every day across the web (Nov 13 stat) (Source: expandedramblings.com)

APAC social network ad spend projected to be $3.60 USD per network user for 2014. Compare that to US (North America) where eMarketer is predicting $32.82 USD per user. (Source: emarketer.com)

Facebook is phasing them out, Google is launching them, but “promoted stories” on Google will work a bit differently: The +Post ads will allow advertisers to showcase things like Hangouts – and distribution is across the entire GDN. (Source: brafton.com)

A recent Infosys survey (n=1,000) has found that more consumers are interacting with retailers on Facebook than on any other platform: “The two websites most commonly selected are Facebook [first], followed by the retailer’s website.” 89% of these consumers have reported that such brand interaction has at least some impact on their purchasing habits. (Source: allanalytics.com)

Dear Princeton University RE: “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017″, have you considered Google Trends consumer search volume for “air” has also been declining steadily..? (In fact, our projections show that by the year 2060 there will be no air left) – Love, the Facebook Data Science team. (Source: m.facebook.com)

Find out how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm ranks your friends for no other reason than to feel l33t. Go you haX0r, you! (Source: thenextweb.com)

Did you know that LinkedIn is now responsible for over 60% of all visits from social media to corporate websites..? (Source: econsultancy.com)

Imagine being able to beef up the profile of your B2B prospects with a psycho-analysis of their intrinsic needs: What motivates them, what they believe and what their fundamental needs are. This goes beyond “sentiment analysis.” (Source: venturebeat.com)

According to its S-1 filing, Twitter’s advertising revenue per timeline view is around 7 times greater for the US compared to its international markets. (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Interesting to ponder the “shelf life” of video posts on social media. On YouTube the avg. video receives 40% of total views in the first 3 weeks of publishing, 30% in weeks 4-12 and another 30% within 12 months of the publishing date. (Source: marketingland.com)

The NSA should possibly think about it’s social media policies with respect to LinkedIn. (Source: techdirt.com)

How will Facebook accelerate usage of graph search? Obviously they need query volume for search ads to attract any real $. Is graph search really the best answer to mobile+local+social? Or is the new Google Maps with strong links to G+ better suited? (Source: searchengineland.com)

Has anyone’s LinkedIn account been enabled with either of these new features as yet: “Who’s viewed your updates” or “You’ve recently visited”…? (Source: techcrunsh.com)

As of May 10th Facebook Home is only in the top 500 in 19 countries, and not in the top 150 for any. Best ranking: Norway at #191 (App Annie). (Source: techcrunsh.com)

FB newsfeed video ads trial starts in July? So very soon you’ll need to decide if you’ll like X brand, download Y app and watch Z video. And then check in with your friends, that is, if you can find them. (Source: techradar.com)

YouTube Trends Map: See which videos are trending right now in cities across the U.S by shares and views, and filter by age, gender. (Source: youtube.com)

Wolfram Alpha analysis of Facebook usage data: Standard population dynamics at play, but nevertheless interesting to see that the older we get, the more we talk about health – and the less we talk about fashion. Would be interesting to see that broken down by nationality. (Source: venturebeat.com)

What 23% of con­tent is pro­duc­ing 66% of daily social engage­ment and 74% of viral reach on Facebook? – Video (Adobe). (Source: blogs.adobe.com)

Twitter keyword targeting in timeline has launched, allowing advertisers to “reach users based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged.” (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Sponsored search ads twice as trusted as social media brand/company posts; Europeans are more cynical of all types of advertising comms (Forrester, n=58,000). (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Certainly a good move on Twitter’s part, they do need revenue other than ads: “Tweeting a hashtagged keyword will make your Twitter account contact your American Express card account and make a purchase.” (Source: searchenginewatch.com)

Digital Strategy and E-Commerce

Digital programme performance is slowly but surely being recognised as a key driver for corporate performance: 31% of CEOs now personally sponsor digital initiatives, up from 23% in 2012. And yet: “Only 36% say their companies have a top-line metric for monitoring their digital programs’ overall progress” (McKinsey). (Source: mckinsey.com)

Another thought-provoking post from Avinash, as always: “CPC is a profoundly silly indication of your search strategy success. It causes companies to make silly decisions, which leads to poor results (both for the digital strategy and your career).” (Source: kaushik.net)

Note: The lifetime value of new customers acquired through Paid Search (SEM) and Display Advertising drops by about 13% over the Dec/Jan period, compared to the channel average for the same period (Custora). (Source: blog.custora.com)

The median load time for the top 2,000 retail sites is 7.25 seconds for a first-time visitor (March 2013) – 22% slower than last year (Infographic). (Source: getelastic.com)

eBay knows that a key driver for the number of product listings is seller convenience. “Sell it Forward” is a brilliant initiative to achieve this goal, whilst also making a small difference in the world (San Fran only).(Source: venturebeat.com)

Suburbean Brisbane retail at its finest..? – Aussie small shop charges $5 “just looking” fee: “If you are going to be asking bucket loads of questions, you are going to have to pay for the information…we are not a charity.” (Source: techcrunsh.com)

From your roots in digital through to “experiential high touch retail” with one of the nation’s top stores. Seriously good work Michael & team. This will work well. (Source: retailbiz.com.au)

With so much scope for integration, as a marketer it might be difficult to focus on the actual end-goal itself: A great customer experience (that drives profit). Nevertheless, here’s the latest rundown on the marketer’s software toolkit for 2014 across Internet services, infrastructure, “backbone platforms”, marketing middleware, marketing experiences software as well as marketing operations. (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Gartner’s spin on the world: Every company will ultimately be a technology company and every business will ultimately become a digital leader. Agree? (Source: gartner.com)

Nice write up of the interesting investments being made in some of the promotion, amplification and optimisation players operating in the content marketing ad ecosystem by Nick Gregg, CEO of StrategyEye. (Source: venturebeat.com)

AmazonFresh is coming to LA and San Fran. Interesting to read Bezos mentioning “getting the right mix of economics and customer experience”. Given they’ve been testing for 5 years in Seattle it sounds like they are just about ready to scale it up proper. (Source: reuters.com)

Shel Israel is correct when he says: “Advertisers [need to] understand and measure the loss of goodwill that occurs when they produce more noise than signal across all communications channels.” (Source: blog.hubspot.com)

What exactly is digital transformation? It’s an overall change of process, change of organisational design and a commitment to employee education. (Source: econsultancy.com)

Altimeter research report on the strategic use of content marketing: What scalable organisational models exist for addressing content needs across the enterprise, what are the models for governance and distribution? (Source: web-strategist.com)

The three V’s of Big Data, forming the basis for competitive advantage: Volume, velocity and veracity (truthfulness). (Source: marketingmag.com.au)

Tim Cook: Yes we do have a bit of cash. Key projects for using up some of that 137B include investing in R&D, supply chain and infrastructure (9B), saving it for possible acquisitions (“we’re disciplined and thoughtful”) and investing in retail (30 more stores in 2013). (Source: gigaom.com)

The more subscription-based content deals Apple can close, the more attractive this product will become. (Source: bloomberg.com)

And this why Apple needs to work out fairly quickly how to turn some of their spare cash into a greater competitive advantage. Google will be waiting to slap some (more) ads on whatever Apple comes up with. (Source: venturebeat.com)

Device-optimised streaming video: Amazon continues to build out AWS, it’s obvious to see how this will play an important part in many existing businesses and ones not even launched yet. (Source: venturebeat.com)

Digital Trends and Future Tech

Digital budgets up, understanding of how digital drives profits, down. Back in 2010 Econsultancy found that 67% of companies rated themselves as “good” / “very good” assessing ROI. In 2013 that figure has dropped to 50%. (Source: forbes.com)

As you ponder Gartner’s digital marketing transit map, think about how your organisation is bringing these neighbourhoods together, and the important role you play to make this happen! (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Marketo/Altimeter Group – Jeremiah Owyang on the future of digital marketing: Paid, Owned, and Earned is converging into one single form of media. Couple of nice case studies. (Source: slideshare.net)

Yes to agile marketing but don’t forget quality altogether: “It comes back to finding the right balance between super-slow perfectionism and super-fast sloppiness”. (Source: chiefmartec.com)

We cannot help but wonder whilst ideas from discussion papers on Quantified/Sensored Self seem a distant possibility from “everyday normal living” right at this moment, in all but a few short years we will have moved very quickly to a new norm of accepted self monitoring (and sharing). – Continuous sharing of biometrics = real-time increase in life insurance premiums..? (Source: blogs.gartner.com)

Two insights on agile marketing from HubSpot’s CEO: #1 It makes the marketing function more transparent. #2 Agile marketing manages activity, not performance (that’s done at a level above the execution of tasks). (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Forrester/BMA: “Marketing must do things that it hasn’t done ever before to be successful” (n=117). (Source: chiefmartec.com)

Nice, but what the report fails to mention is NZ’s disproportionally high budget allocation to traditional channels, when compared with AU. Still a lot of room for growth for digital. (Source: econsultancy.com)

The end of competitive advantage? From IBM’s C-level Exec global survey (n=4,183): “CEOs now expect that new competition is as likely to come from other industries as it is their own”. (Source: chiefmartec.com)

2013 Global Marketing Effectiveness Tracker (n=1,200): “78% of CEOs around the world believe Ad & Media Agencies are not performance-driven enough and do not focus enough on helping to generate the (real and P&L-quantifiable) business results they expect their Marketing departments to deliver” (The Fournaise Marketing Group). (Source: fournaisegroup.com)

The principle of fair use has been upheld in the Google book scanning lawsuit (started 2005), substantiation being: “The crucial point is whether the use to which Google is putting these copyrighted works qualifies as “transformative” – in the sense that it adds value or uses the work in a different and beneficial way. The judge decided that it clearly does this”. (Source: gigaom.com)

“Most marketers create digital billboards and bumper stickers that are ineffective at getting the message across. Those that segment groups, target them effectively, and use digital tools and techniques to deliver a message of value at the right time will emerge as the winners” (Also called ‘Search’…). (Source: cmo.com)

Google Trends now available for YouTube Search. Just as well, given YouTube has now surpassed the 1 billion monthly user mark. (Source: toprankblog.com)

Most banking customers prefer to go online to learn about new products and services (Gallup, US). Are you dedicating sufficiently large budgets to the digital channel to maximise this opportunity..? (Source: businessjournal.gallup.com)

HBR – When people are the channel itself, the rules change: “Top marketers know that they can’t put one over on the customer, nor can they control the message or their customer’s behavior. It takes humility, appreciation, and an orientation towards openness and inclusion”. (Source: blogs.hbr.org)

Forrester is probably right. Google does have the broadest set of affinity data (most varied by source): Spending time (YouTube), connections/sharing/liking (Gmail, G+) and let’s not forget the actual search index itself…(Source: venturebeat.com)

Apparently Facebook Home’s “people first” OS experience has been available on Windows Phone for years. Unfortunately that’s a bit of a moot point. (Source: marketingland.com)

81% of Inc. 500 now use LinkedIn, up from 73% a year earlier (n=170), though survey does not define specifically what is meant by “use”. (Source: marketingprofs.com)

The future of quantified self likely accelerated by implanted and ingestible technologies, with possibly far-reaching commercial consequences? – “Hi this is Sovereign. Let us monitor your body and we’ll give you a lower premium on your life insurance”. (Source: thenextweb.com)

Consumer TV viewing habits are changing rapidly: “iTunes users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date”. (Source: apple.com)

eMarketer – In 2012 Australians spent an average of US$ 3,547 per person (who bought online) – the highest pp in the world and 54% more pp than the US. That is pretty good going really. (Source: marketingmag.com.au)

Newspapers continue to struggle turning traditional advertising dollars into digital dollars: “In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue” (up from $11 in 2011, Pew Research Centre). (Source: paidcontent.org)

Congrats to Luke, Guy and the entire Torpedo7 team – May you always conduct your business in true entrepreneurial style! (Source: idealog.co.nz)

The Apple unofficial official PR machine is in full swing. It better have biometric data. (Source: venturebeat.com)

We’re quietly excited about The Internet of Things. Take ReelyActive’s cost-effective RFID solution, for example: “They have taken some of the smarts out, simplified the receivers, and moved the intelligence to the cloud.” (Source: venturebeat.com)

Ok so Apple is working on iWatch, what other wearable computing will we be seeing in the near future? Interesting to read Google hoping for Glass to drive 3% of revenue by 2015. (Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Just in time for the reboot of the Terminator franchise…? – But seriously, this is exciting from the perspective of Robotics gaining accelerated funding and consumer-minded focus. (Source: nytimes.com)

Content provider fragmentation prevails for consumers even for “pure-play” digital providers: As we’ve thought about this, there isn’t really one “box” as yet that gives you Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube (and HBO) “native” and all on the same box? (Chromecast – sort of?). (Source: venturebeat.com)

Heard the term “API” thrown around but you never quite figured out what that actually is? Here’s a good explanation, and why it’s important. (Source: blog.compete.com)

Email, Lead Gen and Data

Email subject lines may take on a whole new level of importance: Assuming the email made it into the Gmail user’s Priority Inbox, Google may choose to display it alongside search results pages. (Source: imediaconnection.com)

Why do you think men’s fashion e-com retailer Bonobos sent their entire database an email urging their customers to move Bonobos to the primary inbox in Gmail’s new interface? Firstly, because they understand that email is a key revenue driver. Secondly, maximum email channel rev starts with a great open rate! (Source: ryanspoon.com)

51% of all emails were opened on a mobile device in 2013 [infographic]: 26% on iPhone, 12% on iPad and 12% Android (Windows and others at <1%). (Source: getpocket.com)

Only 15% of companies have tested their email marketing templates on mobile devices (Marketo). Given mobile opens are set to surpass desktop this year, make this a priority! (Source: marketingtechblog.com)

If the 20% of your loyal customers account for 80% of your revenue, how much emphasis should be placed on your email channel? Will you require more robust data analysis and decision support to evaluate this increased focus? (Source: marketingprofs.com)

Custora reports that the lifetime value of a customer acquired through email is 11% more than one acquired via Facebook or banner advertising. (Source: blog.3di.co.nz)

“Don’t miss” in an email subject line has a 40% better chance of attracting a click compared to the average B2B email (Adestra subject line analysis report 2013). (Source: marketingprofs.com)

According to Experian, avg order $ value from Email has increased 14.4% comparing 1Q12 to 1Q13 (across all Experian clients at the time). (Source: marketingprofs.com)

Email database quality is still the biggest challenge facing email marketing (Econsultancy). Perhaps it’s time for marketers to trial alternative data acquisition methodologies: Co-reg is a great way to build opt-in email lists quickly and cost-effectively. (Source: exacttarget.com)

Useful collection of email stats by industry: CTR (unique clicks / delivered) and open rate. Retail is second highest on OR but fails to convert the click (Silverpop). (Source: econsultancy.com)

41% of commercial emails were opened on mobile devices for Q3/Q4 2012 (33% on iOS) – mobile is on track to surpass desktop this year. (Source: marketingprofs.com)

Yes, general browser usage stats show Chrome and Safari growing fast (and IE and Firefox dying) but at 51% usage, Internet Explorer is still the browser of (forced) choice for checking web based email – likely due to workplace IT lock-down. (Source: litmus.com)

36% of emails are now opened on a mobile device: Good rundown of Responsive vs Scalable mobile email design (Infographic). (Source: marketingtechblog.com)

With 43% of all email opens occurring on a mobile device, it’s important to understand how your email will look when opened on one. View the infographic to see specifics for the iPhone 5, Galaxy Note II, Nexus 4, Lumina 920 and the BlackBerry Bold 9900. (Source: litmus.com)

Are your customers helping you generate more leads? – If you need a good case study of incentivised referral marketing done well, look no further than Dropbox. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

NZ’s first case study on lead gen optimisation: Lead source websites that exist to provide a service other than lead gen in the first instance provide the best returns. Expertise is required to leverage this fact, maximising lead volumes and optimising for quality across multiple lead sources (metric: advertiser conversion rate and/or $ rev generated). (Source: blog.3di.co.nz)

Email marketing is still rated the #1 tactic for effective lead gen for 51% of B2B marketers (n=435, Ascend2/Research Underwriters). (Source: emarketer.com)

Nice summary on why Dropbox has been so successful, in part because they have created a user experience that people love: Everything is super easy, trust is built and before long there exists product dependency. Paying for the service becomes a consumer necessity. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)

What are you really doing to keep your ecommerce customers buying? Remember: “Repeat shoppers, representing just 8 percent of all site visitors, accounted for nearly 41 percent of total online sales” (Adobe 2012, US). (Source: practicalecommerce.com)

Much like other data providers with access to offline transactional data, Datalogix is positioned very well indeed. (Source: techcrunsh.com)

Nice decision-making flowchart to help find the most suitable way of presenting information in the form of an infographic. (Source: econsultancy.com)

The measurement of B2B content marketing should focus on the end goal: Did you engage the people that matter, and did they fill in the lead capture form. “Instead of thinking of content as a means to fill all channels, where analytics just show how each channel is performing, you should measure who viewed your content”. (Source: venturebeat.com)

AdWords Enhanced Campaigns now support campaign scheduling for call extensions. Good news for B2B lead gen. (Source: searchengineland.com)

How to use Facebook’s Graph Search for intelligence gathering and B2B prospecting. (Source: siegemedia.com)

“Nearly 50 percent of marketers agree that data is the most underutilized asset in their organization, with less than 10 percent saying they currently use what data they have in a systematic way” (Teradata, n=2,200). (Source: teradata.com)

A scary stat given the multitude of targeting technologies on the market today: “Only about one-third of [B2B] marketers are incorporating targeting and segmentation in their digital advertising” (n=243, US). (Source: marketingprofs.com)

Good reminder on data risk: The media and retail industries are reporting the highest incident rates for hacking. And for insurance most data loss occurs due to fraud/social engineering (KPMG). (Source: blogs.hbr.org)

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